


You're On The Wrong Floor: Special Agent John Doggett's Serious Genre Trouble (X-Files Season 8)

by PlaidAdder



Series: X-Files Meta [24]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Gen, Meta, Nonfiction, genre
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-19
Updated: 2014-08-19
Packaged: 2018-02-13 21:26:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2165775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Doggett is a decent character. He's just on the wrong show.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You're On The Wrong Floor: Special Agent John Doggett's Serious Genre Trouble (X-Files Season 8)

 

 

One of the questions I had for this part of the ‘rewatch’ was whether it would be possible for me to like Agent Doggett. From Chris Carter’s point of view, of course, that was the $64,000 question; that’s what was going to determine whether the show would survive the departures of David Duchovny, who had been trying to get out of the show long before season 8, and Gillian Anderson, who must have started trying to get out of the show at around about the time she read the script for “Roadrunners.”

Perhaps it’s not an accident that the mid-season mythology cluster involves people who are neither entirely dead nor entirely alive. Because that’s more or less the fate that was in store for the post-Mulder X-Files: there were clear signs of decay, decomposition was progressing, and yet you could still detect a pulse.

Anyway, my answer to the question of whether I could get to like John Doggett is this: I don’t hate him. I’ve sort of enjoyed watching him, and Robert Patrick’s performance grew on me. I think the first time I would say the directors got anything unusual out of him was in “Via Negativa,” during that last dream sequence where he has that conversation with Skinner about how he’s not sure if he’s really awake. You could see the desperation, and the panic of someone who has no problem with guns, car chases, and battles of all sorts coming unglued when forced to inhabit the special kind of paranoia that comes with working on the X-Files—and how surprised he was by his own uncertainty and fear. He’s mostly loyal to Scully, though you could say with some justice that he doesn’t have much reason to be, and in general I would say that he’s a decent character who is reasonably entertaining to watch. 

All the same, he’s on the wrong show. 

What made The X-Files a standout hit was the way it combined the police procedural with the paranormal. The whole foundation of the mystery genre is the drive to debunk the mystical, explain the unexplained, and reduce the enigmatic to the merely puzzling. In most detective fiction, there are no Great Unknowns, just things that are not known yet. In The X-Files you have people using the tools of law enforcement to attack mysteries that derive from a completely different view of the world in which angels and demons, as well as monsters and aliens, exist. The Mulder/Scully partnership was what held these two opposing things together. We’re always told that he was the mystic and the believer while she was the materialist and rationalist; but in fact both of them belong to both belief systems. He, despite having jettisoned what most people think of as common sense, continued to pursue his mysteries using the methods that he was taught before his ‘conversion;’ and she, despite her scientific background, was opening herself up to ‘extreme possibility’ as early as Season One and “Beyond the Sea.” Both of them combine, not just with each other but within their own characterization, the material and the mysterious, reason and inspiration. They became the center that was strong enough to hold together what would otherwise look like an incoherent mishmash of bits and pieces from ever pre- or anti-enlightenment genre the world ever knew.

Doggett wasn’t built that way. He’s all cop. He would be great for a cop show, but his characterization is so much a part of the police procedural universe, and Scully at this point has gone so far over to the irrational/mystic end of the continuum, that they wind up pulling the show apart. What we have in the first half of season 8, instead of the synthesis we grew to love in seasons 1-7, is an oscillation between horror on one end and detective fiction on the other. The Scully-centric episodes in the first half of Season 8 are in some way related to the horror of her pregnancy (“Roadrunners,” “Badlaa,” “Per Manum”). “Roadrunners” is hideous, “Badlaa” is a thousand times worse, and “Per Manum” has those wonderful flashbacks of Scully and Mulder and the Big Decision To Conceive but the rest of that episode is just alien baby craziness. The two technically  _best_  episodes of Season 8—“Redrum” and “Medusa”—are Doggett’s; and as mystery/thriller plots they work well and they show him off to good advantage. But they’re not really X-Files. “Redrum” is only paranormal from a narrative point of view: the POV character experiences time backwards, which means that he has to take a sort of inverted approach to solving the mystery. But the weird thing about “Redrum” is that Doggett and Scully are essentially irrelevant to it. Martin, the man accused of murdering his wife, does pretty much all of the deducing, and the only way in which you could possibly argue that Doggett’s time on the X-Files matters at all to this plot is that he is perhaps marginally more willing to trust Martin’s apparently irrational insistence that his wife will be murdered that morning. “Medusa,” meanwhile, is not an X-File at all; the creepy contagion turns out to have a very explicable and entirely terrestrial biological origin. It could be an episode of  _Lie to Me_ or  _CSI:Boston_ or  _Castle_. Indeed, the woman playing Dr. Lyle (with a lethal amount of sass, by the way) later landed a role as Superintendent Gates on  _Castle,_ where I actually like her a lot better than Montgomery. But anyway. My point is: Doggett works best on the X-Files when the writers provide him with his natural generic habitat. Which means that he is pulling the show in the police-procedural direction.

Reyes, meanwhile—at least as she’s introduced in “This Is Not Happening,” a title I wish was not ironic—incarnates all the gender-based cliches about femininity and spirituality/irrationality that Scully’s character was meant to subvert. Not only does her superpower appear to be women’s intuition, not only does she talk about her own world view in vague and fuzzy New Agey terms of “feelings” and “spiritual forces,” but after one of her cryptic utterances, Scully says to her point-blank—and she’s absolutely God damn right—“This feels like therapy.” Basically, Reyes is Deanna Troi. Or Professor Trelawney, or some unholy combination of the two. So I’m guessing she’s going to take this show way off into the direction of la-la land. 

Anyway. I guess my point is: it doesn’t really matter whether I like these characters or not, though I have to say that so far I’m not liking Reyes too much. What matters is that they’re not right for the show; or rather, that the show for which they might be right for is very different from The X-Files as we fell in love with it. That show was built for Mulder and Scully and it could not survive them. And during seasons 7-9, The X-Files is in fact slowly going down with that ship. In between the episodes dealing with Mulder and Scully and their possibly alien baby, what we have going on is really a different show. And it’s definitely not as good.


End file.
